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Test Your Add-ons for Memory Leaks!

The MemShrink team was assembled some time ago to work on reducing Firefox’s memory footprint. Many memory bugs have been filed and fixed for Firefox, but add-ons are also a significant factor in how much memory is being used.

There is an ongoing effort to track and stomp memory leaks in add-ons. Here’s where you can help, either by testing the add-ons you created, or testing the add-ons you use. Please read the article on Zombie Compartments, particularly the add-ons section. It should give you some pointers on how to find leaks and how to avoid them. The short version is don’t hold any references to DOM objects after the document is closed.

The AMO review team is already aware of this, and we have added memory leaks to our testing policies. Add-on versions that leaks may not get full review.

Firefox 11

The compatibility bump will be run very soon, but it will be run differently than last time. It has been greatly delayed due to some bugs on our side, but we’re working on resolving them ASAP.

Since Firefox 10 and above have add-on compatibility turned on by default, there’s no longer a need to do maxVersion bumping. So, we’re going to do run the usual compatibility checks, but only email developers if their add-ons don’t pass some of the checks. These add-ons that don’t will also be added to the compatibility override list so users know they are incompatible, provided that the compatibility bug really causes problems in the way the add-on works.

Firefox 12

The Firefox 12 compatibility updates are coming very soon. I’m already working on them.

We don’t deny approval to add-ons that have leaks that originate from the SDK. There are actually many add-ons at the moment that have this same problem. The memory leaks in the SDK should be fixed in version 1.6, which should be released soon. Once that version is out, we will encourage all developers to upgrade, specially those with add-ons that leak because of it.

My add-on got preliminarily reviewed. not full reviewed because of this. I believe the problem is come from SDK . What shall I do? I tried some of full reviewed Addons which base on SDK, all have same problem.